• Have you ever seen “~=” or  “!=” used in Spotfire expressions and not know what this syntax means?

Since I am in Houston this week working in the Ruths.ai office helping to update training, my blog post is going to be a bit short.  I thought I would focus on custom expression syntax the Excel turned Spotfire expert might not be familiar with.

• “~=”  means contains
• “!=” mean not equal to

The “~=” is especially helpful when you are trying to pull a few words or specific characters out of a long string of text.  In the screen shot below I am looking at Lending Club data on loans, and one of the columns available is called emp_title that represents the borrower’s job title.  In the screen shot below, I used an IF statement to identify borrowers working in banking.  Even though their title may be long and wordy, I can test against just the word “bank”.

If([emp_title]~=”bank”,”FINANCE”,”OTHER”)

The syntax “!=” is the same as <>.  However, I wanted to point it out because I’ve seen it used in blog posts, and it helpful for users to understand.

In the same data set, there is a column called loan_status that has 9 different statuses.  I have used the IF statement shown below to consolidate those statuses into only two statuses using “!=”.

If([loan_status]!=”Fully Paid”,”Outstanding”,”Fully Paid”)

In the coming weeks, I’ll be putting up posts about using relations and column matches, and then a series on interpreting the results of Spotfire’s predictive models.  If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at julie@bigmountainanalytics.com.  Have a good week!